


I Think You Know (That I Can't Let Go)

by lightatlast



Series: the gattaca ABO thing [2]
Category: The Martian (2015), The Martian - All Media Types, The Martian - Andy Weir
Genre: Ares3some, Multi, rides again, the gattaca ABO thing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-15
Updated: 2015-11-15
Packaged: 2018-05-01 16:03:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,298
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5212067
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lightatlast/pseuds/lightatlast
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Chris Beck just wanted to doctor people and go to space. Meeting Beth was an amazing bonus. He never really bought into all that stuff about how, for every alpha, there's one omega to rule them all.</p>
<p>Then Mark Watney happens (which is confusing, considering Mark's a beta).</p>
<p>Or: Just One Look (And I Forget Everything) from two carefully maintained feet to the left, and then 14 million miles to the [insert direction of your choice here, this nonsense doesn't really work in the vastness of space]</p>
            </blockquote>





	I Think You Know (That I Can't Let Go)

**Author's Note:**

> I give up on life. This is the Chris Beck POV version of the gattaca ABO thing, in which Mark pretends to be a beta for the love of space.  
> Fun fact: Apparently Chris Beck is Simon Tam inside my head.

Sol 6 is the worst day of Chris Beck’s life, bar none.

……

Chris had been rather acutely aware of the privilege attached to his alpha status since the day he manifested in high school. His parents, the sort of people who would have been genuinely upset of their only son had turned out to be a plain beta, treated Chris’s status like some sort of symbol of their superiority, rather than the quirk of genetics it actually was.

Still, quirk of genetics or not, Chris refused to take it for granted. He knew he’d be preferred over betas, for just about any college or program he applied to. Doubly so if he applied to Harvard, where the Beck name carried some serious weight.

So Chris applied to Yale. He marked “decline to state” on his application, knowing it would make admissions committees assume he was a beta, if they didn’t recognize the name. And he got in.

Of course, he immediately registered with the school as an alpha afterwards, because registry was protection for alphas against prosecution. Chris had never felt any kind of pull toward an omega that would drive him to assault, wasn’t sure he even believed those alphas who claimed a lack of responsibility by reason of instinctual drive, but he wasn’t sure he wanted to risk it.

His second year of undergrad Chris went to a lecture given by a NASA recruiter, who explained that they would soon be sending men to Mars, and suddenly Chris knew where he wanted to go. He’d wanted to be a doctor basically as long as he could remember, a profession which pleased his parents, not that Chris really took that into consideration. But now he knew where he wanted to take his medical skills – into space, the final frontier.

…….

The loss of Mark hits the crew like a satellite to the chest – which joke is in poorer taste than Chris usually makes, but he feels like he’s flailing here. It’s hard to think about losing Mark when he never really had him – not the way he really wanted anyway.

He and Beth spend most of their free time curled up, together, Chris wishing that he’d said something, even if Mark was a beta. They could have made it work, surely.

………

Chris stays at Yale all the way through his MD/Ph. D. Partially because he like it there and partially because it pisses his parents off. His little sister is the only reason he comes home for Christmas anymore, and he doesn’t think that’ll last once she leaves the house.

It’s not that Chris’s parents are bad people, really. They just have some appallingly outdated ideas about orientation combined with old money snobbery that Chris just doesn’t relate to and finds sort of upsetting. Plus, they’ve started pushing him about forming a pack.

An actual Pack, like that term hasn’t come to mean your mate and kids to any sensible person. His parents mean it in the old sense, though, where you pick an omega for breeding potential and collect some betas who will make their alpha look good – all very marriage of convenience, in the style of Victorian novels.

Chris might not believe that there is one omega out there who is destined to be his, but he does believe in love, and he wants it.

…….

Chris takes over Mark’s experiments. He would have even if NASA didn’t expect someone to because Mark was such an enormous nerd. He loved those stupid ugly ferns. Chris had caught him singing to them, more than once. It was just one of a million things about Mark that were way more endearing than they had any right to be.

The problem is, though, that he’s kind of terrible at it. He can keep the complex, multi-systemed, many functioned human body in working condition. But he can’t salvage the plants NASA chose specifically for how difficult they were to kill. Mark jokes – joked – about his botany powers, but Chris is suddenly taking it more seriously than he used to.

He ends up having to turn the plants over to Martinez, before he kills them all. They’re Mark’s – they should live.

……..

Chris gets his degrees, gets into NASA, and gets chosen for an Ares mission – Ares 3 to be precise, under Melissa Lewis. It amuses him that after a lifetime of worrying about making it on his own merit, rather than his alpha status, he actually gets the slot for being less overtly alpha than his competition, but they needed a flight surgeon who wouldn’t be an asshat to a beta commander. Apparently, Chris is the guy for the job.

They start accumulating crew. Lewis is a total badass, and though they picked Chris for his stance on orientation politics, he doesn’t think she would have taken any crap from any alpha she got. Then there’s Beth, and she’s gorgeous and brilliant and highly competent, which Chris is very much into. And then it turns out she’s also a total dork, and it’s adorable, and he’s halfway in love with her by the time she decides they should bone and get it out of the way – her words, not his. And well, he’s a guy even he tries to be a fairly enlightened guy (and Lewis has yet to deliver the upcoming terrifying speech about hitting on Beth), so they bone. It does not get it out of the way.

…….

Did Chris say Sol 6 was the worst day of his life? What’s that saying about counting chickens?

……..

He and Beth turn into a thing. It breaks all kinds of rules, but they’re professionals. It’s great though – simple, comfortable, occasionally (or you know, more than occasionally) smoking hot.

Then Mark Watney joins the crew.

Watney’s a beta like the rest of Chris’s crew, so what the hell is with the way Chris wants to pin him to the floor and sink his teeth into Mark’s neck – worry at it until it leaves a permanent mark? Chris is a doctor, for the love of God, he doesn’t want to put scars on anyone. Especially not (admittedly attractive) betas.

He tells Beth about it. He doesn’t want to hide anything from her, and it’s an issue of instincts, so someone should have a heads up if he’s gonna go nuts at some point. And he can’t tell Lewis because then one of them would probably get kicked off the team and it would almost certainly be Mark, as the lowest ranked member of the crew. He can’t do that to him over some stupid instinctual crap his endocrine system is pulling.

Apparently, “Watney’s hot – I’d be down” is an appropriate response to the knowledge that your boyfriend is having weird alpha feelings about another man – not even an omega, which would be understandable, but just another beta.

Is it any wonder that he loves this woman? (That thought induces a minor, additional panic because it’s only been a few months and holy God, he’s thinking love already?)

They do end up having a serious talk about it. Beth hadn’t really considered Watney in that light but she says she could see it. They decided not to do anything, however, because it isn’t a great idea to put a bunch of betas and an alpha without an omega to stabilize things.

It would be easier, though, if it were just the instincts. Because they are enough of a problem without the additional issues of:  
         1. Watney is in fact very good looking.  
         2. He’s also enormously charming.  
                     a. Beth tells the NASA psychologist that Watney is everyone’s favorite – she’s not wrong.  
         3. It’s weirdly charming how he acts like his dual Ph. D’s basically make him a mechanic who likes to garden.

Basically, Chris is in love with two people. One he can have and one who has apparently never thought of him as anything but a friend. Things could be worse. (They could also be better.)

……..

So it turns out Mark’s alive, which is amazing. Chris told Lewis to abandon him on Mars, which is terrible. And Mark is an omega, which explains the way Chris’s instincts went haywire around him, but also makes Chris’s alpha side lose its shit because he left an omega – his omega – for dead. And yeah, Chris is claiming him, at least in his head. He doesn’t have any right, especially after abandoning him, but he almost can’t help himself.

Chris and Beth had another talk, after they finished crying with relief and guilt, and they’ve decided that if they can get Mark back, they’re not letting him go again without a fight.

…….

The trip out to Mars is difficult for Chris, in a lot of ways. Hiding his relationship with Beth is harder in such a contained space. Keeping his instincts in check around Mark is likewise more difficult in an enclosed space.

But the journey goes as smoothly as 14 million miles in a space ship can go. Chris avoids being around when Mark’s being “PR guy” because watching him be bright and shiny and kid-friendly trips Chris’s trigger so hard it hurts a little. He’s run so many tests on himself trying to figure out if he’s got some kind of hormone imbalance causing this reaction to a beta, but there’s nothing.

Everything is going smoothly, in fact, until a massive dust storm blows up and the MAV starts tipping.

……..

Getting Mark back is a revelation. They crack him out of his EVA suit and Chris realizes he’s never really scented Mark before. However Mark was hiding his omega pheromones has long since worn off on Mars, and while the others choke on the concentrated odor of unwashed human, Chris is fighting off the equally concentrated scent of his omega, alive and right in front of him, unhidden for the very first time. He almost wants to laugh because had he really though all those stories about alpha instincts were exaggeration? He kind of feels like he needs to apologize to his fellow alphas as a whole.

But, despite the difficulty he does shove it down, because Chris may be an alpha by nature, but he worked hard to be a doctor and he’s always come down on the side of nurture over nature. Mark needs a doctor right now, not an alpha.

So he bundles Mark up to his room for an examination – three cracked ribs, a bunch of muscle strains, clear signs of malnutrition and the attendant slow-healing bruises, a surprisingly positive result considering the circumstances. Then Chris puts him in the shower and tucks him into Chris’s own bed, and it’s then, with Mark’s physical needs met as well as possible in the short term, that Chris starts to lose his grasp on the instincts.

He’s pacing back and forth, all of two and a half steps in each direction, needing to move but unwilling to leave Mark’s side, when Beth comes into the room. She doesn’t say anything, just slides through a gap in his pacing and into the bed with Mark, unhesitatingly – and Marks welcomes her the same way. It might just be the touch starvation, but on the other hand, it gives Chris hope that this could actually work.

He’s trying to calm down enough to have a rational conversation, but his thoughts just keep spiraling further and further out of control until finally he explodes. He can’t even seem to finish a sentence properly, just rambles out an unending torrent of words about how Mark is his and how could he not say anything and didn’t Mark feel it too, this incredible pull? Chris just needed to know he wasn’t alone in this, but he also can’t believe he’s dumping all this on Mark, so soon after getting him back. Mark hasn’t even interacted with other humans face to face in a year and a half, Chris is the worst –

And then Mark finally speaks, breaking in on Chris’s ranting – and it’s only then that Chris realizes it took him a few tries to get through – and he says, “Every day. Every day since the day I joined the crew that first time and I had to fight like I haven’t in years, not to hit my knees and bare my throat and beg you to keep me. And Beth, well, you snuck up on me, but I want you, too. I was going to tell you the second NASA let us go after we got home, but I’ve been hiding for over a decade for this mission and I couldn’t just let it go, no matter how much I wanted you.”

Mark wants him – wants them.

Suddenly Chris has to be closer, and he doesn’t think he can stay on his feet anymore. He drops to his knees beside the bed and Mark – Mark tips his head back, baring his throat to Chris like it’s the most natural thing in the world. Chris reaches out a hand to wrap over it, so, so gently because Mark has hurt enough in the last eighteen months. Chris refuses to add to that pain but he has to do this, has to stake a claim. And then he’s kissing Mark, with all the desperation and the fear and the guilt that came from the knowledge that Mark was alone on an entire planet, and when the kiss is over, he kind of collapses, head falling to the bed next to Mark’s. He feels someone kiss him on the back of his head, hears the sound of another kiss, but he can’t even pick his head up to watch Beth and Mark’s first kiss. He just stays, and so does Mark and so does Beth.

There’s nowhere Chris would rather be.

**Author's Note:**

> Come visit me at lightfromthelostland.tumblr.com


End file.
